


In The Dark

by aurora_borealis



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:16:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27648064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: He sounded like he was saying, don’t be dead.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Kudos: 14





	In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for mentions of abuse and addiction

“ _…but maybe it is just the scenery that is wrong. Maybe nothing that happens on stolen ground can expect a happy ending_.”

– _White Teeth_ , Zadie Smith

“ _The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king_.”

\- _‘Salem’s Lot_ , Stephen King

_

**In the Dark**

_

Through the windows of the shop you could see, on display, antiques of all kinds. On display were framed artworks, wooden furnishings, the occasional piece of jewelry. Generally, they were American, from the Colonial period to the nineteenth century. We didn’t label them, though there were some items with fixed prices.

Image very often is what matters first and foremost, even if it shouldn’t be. The very often uncontrollable power of image is that it lies in not only what people see, but what they think they are seeing- what they do not understand as much as what they do, in what way they are seeing it; how they see something, and how much they don’t see. How much is hidden from them and how much they have just not noticed.

And so we made sure to keep every one of these pieces, of such historical value in addition to financial, in the best condition- well preserved, if not new. And if it was in fact new, and looked like an incredibly well-preserved antique, I kept up the disguise, and said that was what it was. I made sure to pay close attention to detail, being vigilant in areas I knew others would be, and looking more closely than I knew anyone else would in other respects.

If you walked by the shop, in the window you would see the items on display, and even without the dimness of the slightly tinted windows, you wouldn’t have known the real from the fake. And if you focused your vision and looked beyond them, beyond the see-through lace curtains framing the windows, you would have seen the interior of the store, and if you looked to the end of it, you would have seen me, behind the register. Surrounded by the antiques in the small but dense shop like a body in a viking funeral, the curtains veiling me in my chamber like a Venetian courtesan of centuries past, I communed with the history of the items, and brought them to the present. I knew much more than anyone else did. The buyers came to look back to their own history in Early America and I presided over it as reclusively and tentatively as someone who would have been considered a witch in those times, with all my transformations and changelings and secrets in spaces the public was not meant to see. I was surrounded by glass and mirrors in that shop, so I always saw myself, too, and from many angles. And I would wait. And they would come, people from the twenty-first century entering an anachronistic fairytale of various eras of past centuries all together, coming into Sleeping Beauty’s castle to look through her furnishings and closet and desk. 

I would have been very unmoved and calm if you saw me. You might wonder about me, but not for too long, because I would make sure not to do anything that would make you think about me for too long. I tried to follow the example of my reflection, in various places across the shop- be a part of the shop, one of its features. You would look at me but you were never meant to see me, not really, not the way you see things you particularly wanted to or didn’t want to see. I wasn’t always successful in not making impressions- but with the customers, I usually was.

Image is everything. In a way I had always known that, and I decided I would try to take advantage of it and use it to my and Hobie’s benefit. Even if I didn’t always succeed, the thought was always in my mind, and I suppose it helped me see things as they were; I was so used to the lie of appearances that I could recognize it. Maybe it hurt me and maybe it helped me, and maybe it was both, at the same time, two corresponding sides like a two way mirror.

Sometimes people end up seeing more than they’re supposed to notice, sometimes how things are overrides how things should be, and sometimes, in response, what should be overrides what is.

I still find myself wondering if the most difficult thing isn’t seeing the way things should be, as opposed to what they are. You cannot find that in a mirror, or in the not completely different kind of reflection, the one of the face of the person looking at you and reacting. It often takes a very long time to find. Even if it was always there, waiting to be recognized.

_

It was some deep hour of the night, the cold spring rain was hammering against my window, I couldn’t sleep, and Popchyk, anxious from the loud weather, was curling up against me, as if for comfort. I had been listlessly laying in bed for so long that it took me a moment to realize I should move my arm, to pet his head, and help him calm down, so at least one of us could be at ease.

Sometimes I remembered things I hadn’t even thought of for years and they wouldn’t stop tormenting me. I was, again, thinking of Boris. It seemed I was always thinking about him, which always made me reflect on how alone I must have been. But that didn’t make me want to stop.

In particular I was thinking about how on the rare occasions there were storms in Las Vegas, or on the more common occasions my dad and Xandra would fight and keep the whole house up, it would end up kind of like this. Except Boris would be there, and he would be able to get the dog to go to sleep, and he’d be able to take my mind off of my dad’s rages and the museum and whatever I was dreaming of, even if it was just for a moment, he’d still be by my side when that moment ended. I hadn’t had anything like that since and probably never would again, and I could never make myself think too long about what Boris’ life may have become.

Popchyk made a small noise, like fear, as outside, a car swerved loudly with a rushing noise, probably losing control in the watery streets.

But, in Hobie’s place, we were as safe as we had ever been, maybe as safe as we ever would be. It was always very easy to lose sight of that.

_

The painting was my mother, and it was me, and it was the life we’d had together. I imagined that I would never tell anyone, and there would be no point in doing so. She would be the only one who would understand, even if, as I got older, I came to terms with the fact that I would have had a hard time justifying what I’d done to her.

I didn’t need to see it. It was there. It would have been there regardless of where I’d put it because once I’d taken it, it was set for good, like the bird’s likeness drying on the canvas, so long ago, by Fabritius’ hand. It had been done, and whatever else happened, it would always have been done. My mother and I had lived and had a life together, and that would always be in the past. Even if it stayed in the past, it would always be there.

And in a sense no one would ever find me. At most, they would see me, and I could not control that. In a way I was trapped, as my mother had been. But she had overcome it, at points in her life, when I didn’t think I ever could. And so I told myself my loneliness was a benefit, a sort of freedom that could be appreciated better by comparison with the entrapment I had known. It made sense. My mother would have understood, I knew, though she had been so much better than I ever could be. She had known that there are worse things to go through than being alone.

_

I hadn’t done it in a while, but that didn’t necessarily have to be a problem. Just as long as I could do it when I needed to. And I’d always been able to do it when we really needed to. The fact that Hobie and I still were living above the shop, and that we had the shop at all, was proof of that. How many tax notices, eviction warnings, had I fended off? I had to do it, I told myself.

It sometimes reoccurred to me that it would have been within my capabilities to get my father out of his debts, and maybe he’d still be alive if I had. Whenever I thought of that I wondered if I hadn’t been given a second chance by whatever was out there in the universe. Either lie down and let it happen like you’re not even there, or do what you have to do. It was probably a good sign, then, that the first option hadn’t registered in my mind as an actual choice when I realized how bad the situation was here. It probably wasn’t a good sign that I decided to fix it secretly and in the way that I had, but at the time, it was the only way to carry on the business, which had always been slow and was in what I had learned pretty soon after really beginning to work in it was a field that had been hit hard by the failed economy. 

“It just hasn’t been the same,” Hobie had said to me once, resigned but calm. It still wasn’t the same, even in more recent years. But sometimes it was better. On some rare occasions, with the store being open more hours, there was more business. And with my influence, it was more lucrative business. And sometimes, it felt better than it would have otherwise, if I was telling the truth. It didn’t feel right, but that was also because I knew I shouldn’t have felt so good about doing it. I knew on some level how it would sound if I ever told anyone how I’d thought, wanting to laugh, _well, that just serves you right_ when I got some high-society client to pay the kind of money that my mother would have made in a whole year on a chair that came from a liquidation sale and probably dated back to the mid-1980s at the earliest.

He could have figured it out, if he’d tried. But no one ever looked close enough at their so-called relics to see what they really were, to see that their connections to historical prestige came from their imagination. I would look at their money in Hobie’s bank account, see our bills paid, our credit score improving, and think, _you all brought this on yourselves._ If the customer bought one of Hobie’s pieces I had just misrepresented as a real antique, I would often be overcome with contempt for them. _Now he deserves to be paid for this work, this work that I’ve never seen anyone else in the city be able to match in quality, in being as authentic as he is. Now and only now you pay him. If I told you the truth you’d walk out. You’d wash your hands like you had rubbed them all over the pavement. Later you’d joke to your friends or family, “I may as well shop in the back of an abandoned Goodwill, can you believe it, those people tried to sell me old scraps.”_ Take it, I would think, and give what we’re owed.

It just hasn’t been the same- that could have applied to a lot of things. It always does, I would think. I always got used to things, and then they ended. Even though I should have known by then, that the nature of my life was for things to end. That, I never got used to. And so I would think, it just hasn’t been the same, even when in some ways it really was, the cycle repeating itself. 

_

New York had never been the same as it was when I was a child, not in all the years since I returned. It could have been a problem with my memory, one of many problems with my memory. It could have been, and likely was in part, real differences that had happened in the world over the course of the time I had been away- the developments and closures and alterations and other results of the Recession and politics and everything else in the world- and since I had not been there for its process of history, and instead living through the financial decline of the late aughts across the country, it took me by surprise, because things always managed to shock me even when they shouldn’t have. A lot of it, I think, is less rational, but probably is closer to the real reason.

I had left the city of my childhood and returned to it, far away from what my childhood had been, no matter where I could go. I remembered my childhood all right. That wasn’t the problem. The memories weren’t incorrect. They were still there, but the context was different, then and now. I would remember parts of the past, and look at it from different angles and perspectives, wondering which one was correct. More would always come before I could ever figure it out. 

_

After some consideration, I made a somewhat subdued but to-the-point profile online one cold April afternoon. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing with the photographs, especially since I was doing it alone and wanted to keep it that way, but I tried to make sure the images were fine, didn’t show my face, or too much else. Which I ended up liking- in a way, I was controlling how others saw me, by posting only partial images. I wasn’t going to say I was open to being with men, and I felt that I would be safer around women in this context anyway. Otherwise I really hated to put a description of myself, but looking online helped me figure out what sort of information I was supposed to put on the damn thing, aside from how much I charged, and I knew very well how much Hobie and I needed. Business wasn’t bad, but there was only so much selling falsified antiques to a select amount of people over a course of years could do to get us safely out of debt and make sure we stayed there, and I was determined to do that.

This was what soon led Carole to me. I never called her Carole to her face, but this was how I thought of her.

On one summer weeknight after work I went to her place. I’d told Hobie I was visiting Kitsey- he never called me when I was over with her. But whenever I would come back, he would always ask me if I ever needed to talk about anything, I was more than welcome to come to him.

Carole’s voice greeted me before I was even in the door. “Am I _glad_ to see you,” she said, when I knocked and said who I was, even though she couldn’t actually see me. “It has been one hell of a day,” she said, opening the door and gesturing me in. She was wearing a black satin robe that enhanced her Old Hollywood look.

“Oh, I can relate,” I told her. We never got too personal with one another, though we did talk, and not just sexually. I was never the first to open up, though- she was very expressive of her emotions and sensitivity, which I sometimes felt I did unwillingly. With Carole I never felt she was unwillingly doing it. I don’t think it was because she was a woman, and more sensitive because of that. I just think she was comfortable with who she was and thus had an easier time saying what was on her mind. That never came easy to me, and often didn’t feel like a real option.

She loosened the waist tie of the robe a little, lying back on her couch. “I got us drinks,” she said, gesturing to the coffee table, where she kept a bottle of Jim Beam and two glasses. No ice. (“That’s how they screw ya at the bar,” she said, “filling it up with ice and a tablespoon of liquor and you don’t get your money’s worth.” The philosophy of that made me think of Boris. I could imagine him saying the same to me, if we had been given the opportunity to grow up together. Sometimes I thought about what may have happened if we had. I thought maybe we would have done all right.) “So you had a hell of a day too, huh,” she said, crossing her legs, which seemed to be bare.

“I suppose we’ll be able to cheer each other up,” I said, taking a drink as she put her arm around me. Carole had made it clear that when she and her fiancé got married, she’d be leaving the city, but not going back to Chicago. It made me, in a strange way, think of how Kitsey always took me out of the city every weekend. If she wanted to leave, she hadn’t said anything, but it would make sense to me. Sometimes I thought the only reason why I was still in New York was because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“You should be happy, Theo,” Carole lowered her voice. She sounded like she was saying she didn’t think I was happy in general. I guessed I’d gotten lost in my thoughts and it was clear. “I don’t like to see you unhappy, really, not just for my sake. You’re so gentle and kind.” She had only seen me alone in her company, though. I watched her drink from her glass until it was empty, one long inhalation and quick swallow. I lay back on her couch. Carole’s apartment was stylish, with new furnishings and bright personal photographs and colorful curtains. The apartment of a lone woman, but an independent and creative minded one, someone who lived in the present. It wasn’t exactly where I’d want to live, but it was a place of everyday life.

“So should you,” I said.

She smiled, leaning over me. “Oh, you know how much I hate being in this city. But I try.” Her hair was brushing over me. “And you certainly help. More than my fiancé does, that’s for sure.” We both thought that was worth a good laugh. The guy never seemed to be around, and it was clear to me that wasn’t just because Carole managed to keep him away when I was there. I wondered if her reasons, like mine, were unlike most people when they decide to get married, if she wasn’t doing it primarily for mutual love. I never asked her.

From there, the mood generally lightened, as it usually did when I went to her, unless and until something going on in the world or in her life upset her. I sometimes thought that maybe it wasn’t that she was more openly emotional in general than I was, but that she felt like she was in a safe enough position to be honest around me. She didn’t have to be who she was every other moment of the day, when she was with me, which I supposed was a sort of freedom, which I supposed I could understand. We were both alone in our own ways, and recognized that in each other but never really said much about it. We didn’t need to. She could say anything, and it wouldn’t matter, it would never get back to her fiancé or family or anyone. In a way, I understood, despite being on the other side from where she was. Maybe that was exactly why. We didn’t pretend what we were doing was anything other than what it was. And knowing for sure was something I wasn’t exactly accustomed to. She was escaping the loneliness and uncaringness of her life. I was making a living, paying bills, and this was also unknown to Hobie. But I often wondered what else I was doing.

Carole threw back her platinum head, and I looked to my side, where the television was off, and above it hung a framed photograph of a slightly younger Carole and what appeared to be her father, seemingly at some kind of party at a bar, both wearing a black and orange Bears sweatshirt (I wasn’t certain what sport they were, though the name felt familiar, probably from the days of hearing my dad place bets in Vegas) and drinking from tall beer steins. She had poured Jim into my mouth from her glass and I could still taste it. “I’m gonna turn the lights off,” she said. I lay there waiting.

No one ever found out. To my knowledge, no one has. Not her fiancé, not anyone I know, and I would certainly have been made aware if anyone had even suspected. I don’t regret it- that’s the other secret part of it.

It was the summer, and one of the last times I went to her or any of the others. Soon I would be engaged as well, but I didn’t know it yet. I didn’t even expect it, even though it didn’t surprise me when it happened. It only ever surprised me afterwards. 

_

One rare occasion, one of the many parties held was actually held at the Barbour house, which hadn’t happened on a regular occasion since Mr. Barbour and Andy were alive. I didn’t particularly like these crowded events, and it was clear many people in the Barbours’ circle didn’t like me being there either, but I went along and went anyway. Sometimes my being unwelcome made me want to leave, but other times it gave me satisfaction, that they couldn’t get rid of me no matter how much they may have liked to. I often had an uneasy suspicion that they thought, as long as I was going to be around, they preferred me to make appearances so that they could make their disapproval clear. So I walked in on my two feet, knowing that whatever they imagined I did upright was just as salacious as what they imagined I did when I was horizontal, either side.

Often when thinking of my own situation I was uncomfortably reminded of Catherine Deneuve in _Belle de Jour_ , dressed in stark-white and ecstatic as she is tied up, pelted with mud, and called derogatory names. If that wasn’t so far off from what I was- constrained in mind and trapped in place, and putting on my pale disguise and smiling as I was perversely attacked, my assailants keeping a sensible distance from me, the dirt and the calling out being the only things joining us.

The night the Barbour house celebrated was very cold, despite being only towards the end of summer, even the beginning of fall. The lights were dimmed inside, and there were candles lit, which made the usual darkness of the house look more traditional and festive. The guests would be looking around the lowly lit rooms and thinking of how the elegant lighting enhanced the décor, rather than how if you took out the candles and just let the lights be dim in an empty house on any other night it would look as if no one was there. They had not seen it as I had, lit only by the stale and pallid daylight sparsely coming through the few and far between windows. They were seeing it presented to the world, not how it truly was, a distinction I knew too well, one that helped me understand the house and its family much more than anyone may have thought.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we hosted a New Years’ party like this?” Kitsey was saying over a recording of harpsicord music, by an artist I did not know. She was wearing a cream-colored velvet Armani turtleneck dress. (Snow-White to Pippa’s Rose-Red.) I wondered if she meant the same people, the same place, some sort of thematic similarity, or something else. I often wondered what exactly she meant, but didn’t always ask. I sensed it was mutual, and respected that. Sometimes it was better not to push deeper. 

“Sure,” I said. I was reminded of being in high schools and trailing along behind Boris to our classmates’ house parties, different in so many ways but not exactly in format- darkened houses and blaring music and crowded rooms of loud voices where everyone seemed to know each other and I pretended I wanted to be there. “Do you always plan so far ahead?”

She laughed at that. “Well, not for everything,” she said to me like it was our private joke even though our engagement wasn’t a secret, which made me wonder if it hadn’t been more spontaneous than I had thought, but then of course, since we’d only been seeing each other for a few months, would it even matter?

I looked around us. Everyone so close together in the dark with their faces turned, and their clothing styles all so similar, I could hardly tell anyone apart. If I took my glasses or stepped back ten feet, maybe I wouldn’t know anyone. Maybe in the light it would be the same. But the dark almost seemed safer. In the dark I could go unknown. I could not forget who was around me or what they had said of me when they did not think I could hear, or when they knew I could hear, but they forgot me.

Similarly - I could not forget the impassive eyes of the old portraits and photographs on the walls that had watched me as a child as I wandered through these halls crying or numbed by pills or both, but I did not have to see them, most of all their cold-eyed portraits with the landscape scenery of where they lived and what this place had been in the background like a forgotten possession in the corner. As a child, I had stared at some of these paintings, housed between Copleys and Romneys that had been won in auctions or bought from prestigious dealers. Mrs. Barbour had thought it was a positive sign, showing interest in art, rather than staying in my room all the time. But sometimes I would just stare at them because it felt like being back in the museum and I kept wondering what else I could have done. And sometimes I would stare at these people in the paintings, these great-great-great-and so on grandparents and other such Barbour relatives of the past, wondering if it had been any of them who had been among those colonists who had set the islands of New York on fire and slaughtered their people centuries ago, in order to refashion it into New Amsterdam. Or if they had just seen what had happened, and decided the only thing to do was profit from it.

A woman with a wide mouth like Platt’s and an indigo dress holding a flower like a knife. A bearded man carrying a sword as simply and lightly as a stick of driftwood. Portraits, reaching far back, hands joining the present and history together. The commemorations of conquest, rendered in oil. I didn’t have to see them for one night. But they were still there, remaining on the wall when their descendants had died before their time. They were still there, looming over me, when my mother had barely any pictures of her own parents to show me, when she’d only had a few photographs of her grandparents and they’d been lost when she had to move in with her aunt.

But they were dead. And no matter who was or wasn’t paying me any attention, for better or worse, I wasn’t. They, too, would say to me, you will never be one of us, just as some of the guys I knew through Jerome would tell me that, not out of judgment but out of a sort of fraternal concern. I didn’t want them to get the wrong idea, so I kept my distance somewhat, but it still meant something to me, even if I couldn’t express it, that they saw me as one of them and worried for me as such. A living person. Not some effigy in oil, vaulted high above, like some vampire in its coffin, open eyed, not among the living but not gone. (For a moment, just a brief moment, I thought of Julie, so unlike this crowd, but she could have fit in if she’d tried. I remembered how the day after the first of many extensive dentist appointments that fixed my teeth I went to see her. She told me she could taste the blood in my mouth, salty and metallic on her tongue as she scraped it over my sore teeth, and smiled at me like it was our secret, which I supposed distracted me from the fact that this was precisely the point.) 

Kitsey put her hand on my wrist, which took me off guard, but then, I liked that in her. She was fun and vivid and alive, and even though I often resented not being able to rise above my own sadness the way she seemed to, I had to appreciate the feeling that came from being around someone who was so alive. It was always me and her at these functions- no one else in my life came. Hobie was never invited to these things, which I really didn’t like, but if I didn’t enjoy going to them I didn’t wish it on Hobie either.

Kitsey was always telling me how perfect our engagement was, and how much better everything would be when we were married, and how happy her family would be and thus how much happier we would be. Which made sense in a technical way but when I thought about it, but not a realistic way. Did Kitsey actually ever feel happy, or was she just pretending? How could the family be happy with me in it, when they’d just inevitably realize how miserable I was, and did they not notice that they were the only people on their circle who seemed to be able to stand me? How would our marriage fix anything if our engagement didn’t make anything better, and sometimes seemed to make things worse?

I put it out of my head as if I had never thought it, but I knew the thoughts would come back. All the thoughts I tried to send away always did.

“Come on,” she said to me, half-whispering in excitement. Her hand, even in the dark, was stark white in contrast to mine. I didn’t know where she was leading me or what she had in mind. I followed through the halls, lit with fire-lit candles, as if it was another time altogether. 

_

Platt had convinced me to come with him to some bar one night. He did invite me places- to his credit, he didn’t act as though he despised me nor did he actually feel that way about me. Which did lead to him being a little too familiar for my liking, but then, maybe it was just him and not just how he acted that I didn’t always know what to make of.

(I did understand, I would sometimes think, but never say. What it’s like when it’s your fault and nothing anyone can tell you will ever make you believe otherwise even if part of you also knows it wasn’t. Maybe he thought the same but neglected to tell me- he was often pretty open around me, but I’m sure he had his boundaries, his secrets. We all did. He wouldn’t have been a product of his home without that quality, that drive to conceal. I wondered if that was why they all seemed to want me there so much. If they recognized that in me.)

“So, anyway,” Platt was continuing, a few drinks in, but coherent and in his right mind and all. For now, at least. I did want to tell him to keep his voice down, but between the television, the customers, and the music, it wasn’t as if people could hear him, really. “You don’t have to worry so much. Really. You can relax. It’s going to be a really good thing, you coming into our family.” Something about the way he phrased it, or maybe his tone, struck me as surreal, and I didn’t know what to say.

“Who said I was worrying,” I said absently, looking down at my hands.

Platt laughed, long and hard. “Oh man. You’re like a human– what do you call those things. Those drugstore- a human mood ring, yeah. All anyone has to do is look at you and see what you’re feeling. I don’t mean to offend you, but you know.” He gave some kind of gesture I didn’t exactly understand and finished his drink.

“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say, even more uncomfortable than I had been a few moments ago. My head hurt and I kept thinking I needed to go home because Hobie was working on something and I didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to live one more moment in Platt’s everyday life. I swallowed, and found my throat was sore. I could hear the speakers faintly playing a song that I recognized as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which didn’t seem to exactly fit in the environment, but still stuck itself in my mind anyway- _when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn…._

“All right, I’m a little drunk. You know how it gets,” he said self-deprecatingly, and, alarming me, putting a hand on my shoulder with a force heavier than I anticipated. “I should tell you that this is probably the best thing that could have happened to our family and I really have to thank you, Theo. For what you’re doing for us. It’s kind of like, we all have a shot again at being a family again. Don’t tell anyone I said it like that, though. What I mean is, you’re saving us.”

I wanted to ask how I could possibly save anyone, when I could barely do anything for myself. I wanted to ask, how was I saving anyone, when I was barely doing anything. I very well could have asked what he thought I could do for them, if they couldn’t get out of the shadows of grief on their own. And it was yet another time without a number I felt that I had missed something and did not understand the circumstances I was in or how I had come into them. 

“I- Platt,” I began, trying to put myself together. “I really don’t think- I mean, thank you, but I don’t think that I am. I don’t think that’s right.” Having to think about the words he’d said made it seem ridiculous and I was starting to think I should have just changed the subject, for my own sake if not Platt’s. “I’m not saving anyone. That’s not what this is. I think you-” I think you’ve had too much for tonight, I was going to say, even if I wasn’t even sure if that was why he was saying all that.

“Listen, I get it,” Platt told me. I wasn’t sure what “it” was supposed to be, and considered saying so, but didn’t really feel as hostile as that may make me sound. “Sometimes when you’re trying to do the right thing you start doubting yourself if you’re not used to doing it.” Which technically was true, I supposed, but I still was not following him, nor was I sure I wanted to. “Don’t let anyone make you think that shit. You can define who you are, and your future, and all that.” It didn’t sound inspiring, but then, I’m not sure if it was meant to, if he wasn’t thinking of himself and his own circumstances even as he gave me advice meant for mine. He took another drink, and called over the bartender, and asked for another round, for both of us. I didn’t feel like having any more. 

It was getting very late, and I was sure Hobie was wondering about me if he was still awake, because I’d said I would be back that night. There were very few patrons left in the bar. It looked like something old, mid-twentieth century and forlorn and classic, like a scene from an Edward Hopper painting or a film noir, but not really, more like a replica. I wondered how often this was what Platt saw when he looked at his surroundings. An empty replay of the past that was beginning to be abandoned.

“I dream about them,” he said to me, his words starting to slur. “Everyone in this town acts like we’re not supposed to feel anything about it. I used to be like them. I didn’t know shit. Now I know what you went through.”

“We don’t have to talk about-” I started, horrified, but he put his arm around my shoulder and leaned in close to me, shocking me out of speaking any more.

“I hate those assholes too,” he said. I wasn’t entirely certain who I meant, but it seemed to me that he meant his family’s circle, their acquaintances and fellow socialites and old families, and in that moment I almost felt sick realizing I did hate them sometimes and that Platt must have sensed it in me somehow. “But I’ll be there for you. We’ll all be there for each other from now on. We can do this all right this time.” I could smell his breath, gin and bourbon and whiskey. His mouth almost touched my face. I really wanted to move but was afraid he would fall off the barstool or grab me closer and start crying. With a sick feeling I realized no man had ever held me in this way in my life except Boris.

Perhaps, I thought, dealing with them was better when they were so cold and distant. It was wrong, I knew, and it didn’t help them to be like that either, but it almost seemed like they were more used to it, more comfortable that way. It was more familiar that way.

My throat was thick. I just wanted to go home and put this whole encounter out of my mind. But I couldn’t ignore any of what Platt said, even the parts that weren’t true, because I knew that just because something isn’t true, doesn’t mean its effects don’t take impact and last longer than a lot of things ever should. I was beginning to have a feeling that even if Kitsey and I could be good for one another, we were far off from the point where we would logically begin to do so, and there wasn’t any “we,” and this wasn’t a “this time,” because nothing had ended, and if that couldn’t be acknowledged, then everything would still be wrong.

“We really should go,” I told Platt, after a long moment of silence. With what seemed to be clarity, he pulled away.

“I’ll get a cab,” he said stiffly, which made me worry if I wasn’t the one who had incited whatever had happened. “Don’t worry about the bill.”

“All right,” I said, unable to look at him, staring ahead at the selection of liquors on the wall of the bar in front of me like an artillery rack in multicolored glass. “I’ll see you around.”

That night, back at home, I found myself getting in the shower, turning up the water until it was so hot I could barely stand to be under it. But I’d felt worse, and I stayed, washing my skin so thoroughly that my fingernails clawed my flesh raw and scratched as if I could get out of my body somehow if I tried hard enough. I felt physically wrong, defiled by my own hands, but I knew the feeling came from the inside and no amount of cleaning I did would ever make it go away, which just made me turn up the heat and scrub harder. I felt sick. Hobie was asleep, and Popchyk was obliviously playing around in my room. Under the cover of the shower’s waters I wept, not silently, but unheard.

I slept alone, dreamlessly, a mercy. But not before a few minutes of miserable lying awake. Sometimes I did not like being alone so much after all. I missed my mother, believing I would be able to manage my problems, deal with my sadness, if she was alive now, and we were together. Sometimes I felt myself missing Boris, and being able to talk about my mother with someone who understood and cared, and being able to lie next to and be held in the arms of another living person and not the tangled weeds of isolation. 

Alone and isolated are two different things, and there are worse things than being alone. There can be worse things than being isolated. But if you are isolated it’s harder to live with. The isolation wants you too much to let you go, it gets used to you.

I did not dream that night, for which I was glad, not knowing what specters from my day would appear luridly in my dreams. But the next night I did dream. I dreamed I lay in the sands of Nevada, staring up at the moon, and Boris was next to me, but I did not turn to look at him. Maybe I could not bring myself to look even though I could have and nothing was stopping me. Maybe I was afraid if I looked he would disappear.

I can keep a secret. I can love in the dark and let no one see; I can love in the daytime and conceal it, put it back in the shadows, where no one thinks to look in the day, all hidden and constrained. The bird is like me, I thought. Lying in wait for so long in solitude, and I had forgotten what it was I was waiting for. 

_

I dreamed again. Laying in Kitsey’s bed one night at the end of autumn, I had a dream about a person that had my face.

I was in the museum, as I was in many of my dreams. There were no windows in the exhibit, a room full of paintings and relics from Colonial America. It wasn’t a real exhibit, but one of my imagination, one that I must have thought would exist. I was walking through it, taking it all in, although I didn’t remember most of it soon after I woke up, even though I kept feeling vaguely close to recalling details, they only ever amounted to certain senses. I didn’t forget the whole thing, though. At one point in the dream I came to a portrait above me, very lifelike, possibly seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The dim exhibit had lights nearby the painting illuminating it in some parts and shadowing it in others, almost a flickering effect, like a small, crowded nightclub.

The portrait was of someone with my face, but it couldn’t have been me. I wasn’t alive in that time, I thought, but could not think of who it could have been of. Very still face, almost like a postmortem photograph. In his arms - the decaying corpse of an overgrown bird, half skeleton and half flesh, the way people used to hold animals in portraits, dogs and lambs and weasels. I blinked and the bird that was too large was gone. In the light I saw the person in the portrait had mirrors for eyes. I looked into them and saw nothing, not even my own reflection. It was then that I realized it wasn’t a painting after all. I couldn’t understand why I had thought it was a painting, just because it was in a museum. It wasn’t looming over me. It was my exact height and stood eye-to-eye with me, and its mirrors shone in the dark like pristine silver. It was smiling, closed mouth, which made me anticipate its speaking, which I knew was inevitable as soon as I had thought of it.

Its hand reached out to me as if to hit me or take my face and caress it. I could not move. Its hands felt like nothing, like no one was touching me at all, but its fingers were running over my mouth as if shaping clay, reaching inside me. I still felt nothing but I wanted it to stop, I wanted to kill it or beg it to stop, but I couldn’t. It was breathing in gasps of air as it touched me as if our bodies were somehow connected, as if it was breathing and I was its source of oxygen.

“Now be silent,” it said, in my voice, some altered version of it that was still recognizable to me. There was no hatred or pleasure or any sort of emotion in the words, just a vacant, closed smile that I could barely make out. You are not me, I thought. “No,” it agreed. The mirrors were blank as canvas as they slightly, but visibly, widened. The exhibit was bright, and I saw that the thing that was not me was unnaturally pale, bled dry, a dried wound under its mirrors. It kept staring at me and I realized the blood was fading and I was collapsing and it was breathing more certainly. “Oh,” it said placidly. “Too bad.” But it did not see me anymore and had begun walking away.

I woke gradually, with my hands over my face. The moonlight cast silvery shadows over Kitsey, who was sleeping soundly, due to her antidepressants, which I supposed were effective in at least one of us. The pale, cold light shining over her unclothed body, covered with just an admittedly thick and high-thread count sheet despite the cold, had for a moment, at least to me in my morbidity, the look of a corpse in a morgue. So white and undisturbed, so deep in rest. I wondered if she ever looked at me as I slept and what I looked like to her. I wondered what I looked like to Boris, and if we ever met up again, if I would look the same to him, if he had imagined how different I might look now. I knew I couldn’t have been much to look at, but he was always by my side anyway.

My head was pounding. I didn’t have any pills on me. I knew well enough that covering something didn’t make the image leave your mind, but rather, strengthened it, warped it to a more powerful apparition. Nevertheless- I put my hands over my face and tried to go to sleep, and was there for a long time, awake, my fingers covering my closed eyes like layers of protection. 

_

I always made sure to delete my computer history and to be careful about what I searched in the first place (which was why, under different circumstances, it may have been possible that I would have never even known about Miami). But, by this time in my life, computers had gotten more precise, and managed to have a sort of accuracy about location that almost looked like sentience. This was why I would often get targeted with advertisements about local restaurants or theater events, suggested videos about local politics, things like that. It was very strange, because I remembered when cell phones and computers were two very different pieces of technology and people in the world were not as intertwined, or entangled, with one another by the strings of technology.

One day a video came up when I went online, the title of it catching my eye because a name that seemed familiar was in there. _Danielle Ferrera New Interview_ , it said, the thumbnail image a young dark-haired woman maybe a couple years younger than me. I think part of me knew, or suspected, and that was why I opened the link- so I could be sure. I don’t know why I would have done that. I never wanted to know. But on some level I wondered if I was trying to figure out what they would be asking me if I allowed reporters to get near me, which I never had, except for somewhat more recently to let society-page photographers get me in the picture when the people I was with wanted me next to them. (I often ended up getting cropped out of the picture anyway, which I suppose was what everyone wanted).

The video began playing, and I half-payed attention to the first few moments of it. Avoiding the inevitable, maybe.

“Danielle is one of the survivors of April 2003’s Museum Attack. She lost her mother and father in the attack, which was orchestrated by a far-right terrorist ring made up of five men. Three of them are serving life in prison, one of them died during the Attack, and the last one evaded justice and has not been sighted since that day over ten years ago.” I was listening, and couldn’t stop. It took me a very long moment to turn my head and look away from Hobie’s checkbook and back to the computer screen, which seemed to bright to look at directly.

“Danielle,” asked the reporter- vacantly, I thought he looked familiar, and in my shock I had missed some of the interview, but did not go back and replay anything, it did not occur to me as a possibility- “you said you feel as though people have forgotten about the tragedy. Would you like to say more about that? Do you feel that you and your family have been forgotten?”

Danielle looked into the camera, tilting her head carefully, her expression betraying nothing. I didn’t think I could do that. I didn’t think I could listen to any of these questions, let alone answer them. But I was listening, I realized as I thought of it, and I knew I would have a very difficult time putting them out of my mind, and probably wouldn’t manage to do so.

For a very strange moment in between the reporter’s question and Danielle’s answer I felt that we were in the room together, Danielle and me, looking silently at one another.

I wondered if it had been the same for her. In college someone had asked me if I ever felt abandoned by this country, this society; many progressive classmates and professors had sought my opinions and personal thoughts like they were hunting, but when I didn’t give them what they want, they realized they had no use for me, and concluded I just didn’t _understand_ the world and politics and relevant issues the way they did. Had I ever considered the economic state of the attackers that could have led to their radicalization? (Well, they clearly had the money to carry out their operation.) Did I have anything to say about what had and had not changed since that day? (Not to them I didn’t.) I clearly hadn’t learned anything from the experience. Now, in Park Avenue, it was the same from a different perspective. Often, the conservatives I brushed elbows with wanted to make sure I wasn’t blaming any of them, because they certainly didn’t mean any ill will. They were so happy when I didn’t _bring politics into things_. They were so happy when I didn’t _open old wounds_ and that, regardless of what other problems I had, I clearly wasn’t _blaming people for things that happened long ago that they had nothing to do with._ They were so happy that I didn’t say anything more aside from what they asked me to console them with. And then they were unhappy when they saw I wouldn’t give them much else, and sometimes, that I had nothing to give, and sometimes, that they suspected I felt and thought things I could not say to them, things they would feel justified in outwardly hating me for rather than just covertly. I could never give anyone enough. I could never give anyone anything. They would never look at me and see what they wanted- a version of myself that they had created from their own projections and wishes, half shadow and half reflection, only there when they looked. 

“I meant that, well, I think some people didn’t want to talk about it for too long then. And so many people don’t know about it now. I’ve looked at the old news from when I was younger. And this is only my experience, I am only speaking for myself, I just want to make that clear. But now that I’ve said that, there were so, so many people just saying _don’t politicize this, it’s not about that_ soon after the attack and when the trials were going on. They were saying it when people were talking about it in more detail than a few minutes and saying why those people did it and what they believe. And I think a lot of people didn’t want to think about it as something people did, for those reasons, they felt better thinking about it as something sad that had just happened.”

_You’re right. That’s why they forgot her. Because they wanted to and finally had an excuse_ , were the first thoughts that come to my head. Danielle hadn’t said whether or not she personally felt forgotten even though that was what she had been asked, but her answer said so much of what I had thought for years but had never spoken of, had barely even written about in my extensive journals. I was biting my lip so hard I could barely feel it anymore. My hands were shaking and my fingers dug into my palms. She was right. And she would continue to be right, and I could have told her it wasn’t just her, she was right, and no one ever wanted to remember. Sometimes thinking about it made me wish I had died. Sometimes thinking about it made me so angry I didn’t even know what to do with it.

“Thank you, Danielle. You are not the only person who shares your perspective of the events, or the coverage of the events,” the reporter said in his dull, steady voice. I tried to breathe normally. “Now, something viewers may not know about you is that your artwork has been featured in the Metropolitan Museum itself. Two years ago, one of your pieces was featured in an exhibit dedicated to the artwork of high school students of New York. What would you like to say about this piece?”

Danielle smiled like the Mona Lisa, her eyes much older than her young face. She couldn’t have been older than twenty. “Well, when I was in high school, I really enjoyed art class. And I realized I liked taking pictures, and I began doing it as a hobby, first straightforward taking pictures, then later as an artistic outlet. Taking the pictures, altering them, using other mediums along with the photography.” She explained it very modestly, looking at the reporter, and not the camera, which made me wonder for a moment if I’d imagined that moment before when she had looked at the camera. “I liked to take pictures of my friends and family, my surroundings in the city. And at one point I wanted to make something special in memory of my parents.” 

The screen’s image shifted to show a photographic self-portrait, Danielle, a few years younger. She is holding a framed photograph of what must be her as a child and her parents, the photograph somewhat hazed over with age. The Danielle of the self portrait is standing on the sidewalk, holding the picture, her head tilted somewhat down, but her eyes looking straight ahead into the camera. I could hear footsteps and realized Hobie was inside, and I muted the volume. I never wanted to make Hobie talk about any of this, and so I tried to never address it even indirectly. The footsteps grew louder so I paused the video, even though I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to watch the rest of it later, and went into the hallway.

“Oh. Theo, I didn’t realize you were home,” Hobie said as I came into the hallway. I nodded. “Did something happen?”

I realized I should say something. “Why do you ask?”

“You seem nervous. Are you all right?” he asked. Somehow, he always knew. I think, looking back, he knew more than he ever let on.

“Yes,” I said, “thank you.” I looked away, at one of the art pieces on the wall, a black-and-white photograph of a beach in winter. I’d never asked where it was, I realized, and not for the first time did I think I had been far less than what Hobie deserved. I should leave, I thought, before anything happens. “I think I’m going to take the dog out for a walk,” I said, looking down. The hallway seemed narrow, and small, even though I’d never thought of that as a bad thing before I needed to leave. And so I left, just the way I always did.

_

As a child, the Barbour house as I knew it had a sterile, untouched atmosphere that I am certain was meant to evoke cleanliness and purity. But as an adult, it still felt the same, but in an abandoned, entombed way. Less like a home of a wealthy family who owned generations’ priceless worth of artwork and heirlooms decorating the house, and more like a strange dream of the past, where the current and previous centuries all came together in one hazy, dusty altar to something forgotten that no longer existed. A place that did not seem like somewhere people should be. Were it not so clean, it could have been an abandoned home.

I wondered if this was why Mrs. Barbour spent so much time in bed. Not only because of her encompassing sadness that would make her want to stay there in the first place, but because she had seen it and finally understood how unwelcoming of a place it was, how it was a place that was best stayed away from. Some days that year, and after, I would think, if I ended up a part of the family, would I end up any different- secluding myself from what I had married into by barricading myself in a dark bedroom and a steady amount of pills.

Sometimes when I would stay overnight in Kitsey’s apartment, knowing we would be going to the Barbour house the next morning a small voice in the back of my head, one from my childhood, would repeat itself, every time. _It’s a bad place. It’s not right in there_. But I would go anyway. I was used to bad places, where nothing was ever right, and so I told myself, one more, this particular one, isn’t wrong. It’s as right as I will ever get, I thought. I always slept better at Hobie’s place, but back then, I didn’t notice it, or I didn’t allow myself to think too much about it. This was what I did. Not allow myself to think too much about what was already there, being thought of anyway, by others if not by me.

_

I couldn’t sleep one night. I thought of how when I lived in Las Vegas I took such bad care of my teeth that they ached, so I flossed so hard that my gums bled, and one day I could barely talk from how bad the pain was. The damage, I suppose, had already been done long ago with Boris. He had bought a can of Pepsi and placed it against my face, but it was so cold on my skin I flinched. So he held it in his hands for a minute, and then clasped my face in his cool, but not freezing fingers. And, for the moment, the pain lessened. It was still there but subdued, overridden. That was how it had been with us. We’d gotten through it, no matter how we had to do it, even if we just barely managed, even if we didn’t even understand how. Sometimes I thought it was like Xandra’s Tarot card of Strength, the woman holding a lion, having tamed him, somehow, overpowered him by some unknown method. Maybe it wouldn’t last forever, but for the time being, Strength was getting by.

_

I met Jerome one night, telling Hobie I was out getting cigarettes. It had rained that evening, and the air was misty and cool, the pavement wet and slick, shining in the dark, illuminated in all the colors of the neon signs I passed as I walked, _Drugstore Open 24/7; LIVE GIRLS; Subway_ , and the Christmas lights, multicolored strands as well as plain white and blue _._ It was a nice walk, I thought- losing myself in the city, knowing exactly where I was going.

When I found Jerome by the club he frequented I gave him the money. “That’s a hell of a lot, Theo,” he told me, handing over the bag. “You’re not taking all this at once?”

I laughed. “And what if I was?” I’d been around long enough to know what he was getting at, though. Even though Jerome was some years older than me, I was sure I’d been in this at an earlier age than he had.

He shook his head. “Listen, I’ve already had to restart a few times because of the law. I don’t try to kill my clients. Do you think I sell to you because I think you’re going to be the latest segment about the opioid crisis on your local news channel back home?” I’m from New York, I thought. “Fuck no, Theo. Don’t get yourself in trouble.” Given that my fiancée’s friends and a large part of my wedding party seemed to think I was a few months away from putting too much in a syringe and dying, I thought, I probably already was in some kind of trouble.

You cheap wannabe Scarface fucking ex-business student pusher, I thought, almost laughing, would you really be so moved? “I could get anyone to sell to me and you know it. I’m a great customer, aren’t I?” I said, half-smiling.

“Fuck, Theo. You know what I mean. And you know what you’re talking about with that I-can-get-anyone-to-sell shit, man. You want to be surprised by taking a ton of shit laced with fentanyl?” Jerome reasoned with me, or, attempted to. Of course I knew what he was saying. I could have said something back, like, oh, I didn’t realize you were the Surgeon General of the United States. I could have said, the first time someone tried to kill me I was thirteen, you’re going to have to do better if you want to scare me.

“Forget I said anything,” I told him, holding up my hand like a peace gesture. “It would be a waste to take it all at once anyway. Okay?”

“All right, man,” Jerome said warily. “No bad blood. Take care of yourself.” I told myself I wouldn’t call his number for a while, I’d bought a pretty good supply and besides, I had a lot of things ahead of me I needed to do and should probably cut down for. I also told myself I wouldn’t call his number because he was beginning to get suspicious in a way that felt almost like concern, which I didn’t want from him. I always hated how people who didn’t seem to like me very much still found me a source of immense pity, like my existence itself was too wretched to comprehend.

I missed Boris, but then, I always did. He knew me and my secrets better than anyone ever had. Even when he was trying to help me feel better, I never once felt like he saw me as lesser, and he had never once made me feel lesser than he was intentionally or not. Even when we were doing shit that could have killed us, I knew he really had my well being in mind. I knew he cared about me. And sometimes, for the slightest of moments, I would wonder if either of us would even feel the need to be doing these things if we still knew one another, if we had never been severed from the only people in the world who cared for the other.

I would think about it, and I would let the thoughts run back into the shadows, into the halls with the lights turned off and the portraits hidden, into the ruins of demolished buildings that would be smoothed out by new ones, into the oblivion of dreams that are forgotten the moment they end and morning comes.

“Oh, I will,” I told him. “Happy Holidays.” I walked away in the rainbow-tinted darkness of the early winter night, feeling fine enough, and knowing that would soon pass. It always did.

_

Pippa and I had decided to go to the movie theater together, which I’d nervously anticipated ever since we had made the plans. Solemn and anxious, I’d agonized over what to wear, what to say to her, what to keep from saying, how to act and what emotions to convey or not show. I doubt Everett puts this much thought into what kind of person she deserves to have around, I thought, I doubt he puts half as much thought as either of us do for anything, he’s nothing like us, sometime she must realize that, realize that she shouldn’t waste her time with someone who could never understand her.

I realized I spent much of my time doing the same- expending it on people who could never understand even if they wanted to. But, unlike Pippa, in my opinion, I really didn’t have many options, and maybe it was better to not be understood, if it meant people didn’t have to know me as thoroughly and intimately as a pathologist performing an autopsy, as I was certain would be the inevitable result if anyone was to ever really know me.

The day before I was to meet up with her, while Hobie and I were closing up the shop, he turned to me. He was wearing a sage green sweater that complimented his dark complexion, and his earring glinted in the late afternoon light that came through the windows. “Pippa tells me you’re going to see each other,” he said pleasantly, but the impact of his words threw me off, not because I felt like I’d been caught doing something I should have, but because I realized I hadn’t mentioned it to him and knew it must have looked strange that I hadn’t.

I nodded, without saying anything, completely aware of the possibility that even in his kindness Hobie may have thought I had come to him so wrecked he couldn’t help me, not that there was something wrong with me, but that there wasn’t anything right with me.

“Well,” Hobie continued, “I’m happy the two of you will be able to spend time together. It’s nice to have her around,” he said, and seemed to stop himself from saying anything more. He lost her and I was her replacement, it occurred to me. Not that I believed Hobie saw me that way, but that he wouldn’t be wrong to. Even a matter of years ago, it had been another time, and even in the present, I knew the systems in place often failed people not because they didn’t work but because that was how they worked. I always thought about Bracegirdle’s efforts, and realized even when I was home with Hobie, it was yet another place I wasn’t meant to be.

“I miss her too,” I said. I never really wanted to bring up any difficult topics with Hobie, and I never wanted to make myself a burden to him emotionally in addition to all the other ways I had, and I certainly never wanted to completely open myself up to anyone, even Hobie. But sometimes in my own way I did, just a little. _I can tell she misses you. I would,_ I thought. 

Hobie put his hand on my shoulder a moment after I said it, as if he was considering whether or not to do it. I wanted to tell him that I had been less alone because of him, and without him I don’t know what would have become of me. That ever since Boris I hadn’t had anyone who really cared about me in my life, even if that was different, and I missed him too. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it when I thought about it. Sometimes putting it in words makes it more powerful, more painful.

“Um,” I said, wondering if I’d been quiet for too long. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind if I stayed in tonight. I know I said I had a party to go to but it-“ I shook my head, “I think I’m just going to stay here tonight. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” said Hobie, as if he didn’t understand what I had said, but even listening to his voice was comforting and not only was I less alone, I truly felt it and understood it as true when I was with him. We went upstairs, and as we got closer to the door, we could hear Popchyk barking from the other side, waiting for us.

_

Pippa and I were in the movie theater, waiting for the lights to go down and the show to start. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a theater, but it always felt strange to be in one with the lights on, the screen flashing a loop of trivia questions and advertisements, silently- so any quietness on our behalf was all the more pronounced. We were the only people in our row- we were early, and anyway, I had a feeling there wouldn’t be many people coming in after us.

She looked like she was trying to be happy, but wasn’t really, something I could recognize having seen it in myself for years. From the corner of my eye I could see her side profile, still and pensive, looking forward as weary but undaunted as some medieval heroine in a pre-Raphaelite painting, her waved hair shining and red and dusted in melting snowflakes, her pale oval of a face unmoving and gentle, her soft lips done in pale pink lipstick. And her eyes. Her eyelids were somewhat downcast, but her gaze did not waver at all. We were so close, but I couldn’t touch her. Maybe I didn’t want to- I couldn’t give her whatever it was I thought she needed, I didn’t have it in me, whatever it was.

“You know,” Pippa said, her voice even, but a tinge of bitterness in it. “I didn’t go to a movie theater for years after the attack. Not because I was afraid of it happening there. But because I just had to go to the movies with my friend on another day when I should have just gone that day. And that day I chose the audition and the museum. So thinking about going to the theater was just like I was trapped back there again. In the attack, but also in the time right after it.” Her voice was low enough that I doubted anyone could make out what she was saying. Still, I couldn’t imagine talking about it out in the open like that. She was so confident. I didn’t know how I turned out the way I did in comparison.

I nodded, not entirely knowing what to say. “And…” I began, not knowing if I should even ask. But I supposed my asking it would give her more than anyone else could give her by just saying _I’m sorry that happened to you_ for the thousandth time- understanding. “Is that why you don’t like coming to New York?” I asked, making sure I was quiet and ending up almost whispering, not being able to look her in the eye as I asked.

She turned to look at me, though. One of her eyes was slightly bloodshot, as if she hadn’t been sleeping lately. “Kind of,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t like it…” she seemed like she was having trouble articulating what she meant. If she only knew, that was why I myself was so quiet all the time. She rose her head and inhaled. “Because I do. I really do. You know what I mean. It’s like that for you too, isn’t it?” I froze, and didn’t answer. I wondered how she could tell. “It’s just hard,” she said flatly. 

I wanted to smile and embrace her because we had survived and were together and I wanted to curl up into myself because she had seen some horrible part of me and I wanted to just cry and be held by her because she would understand, even if I didn’t tell her anything. But I couldn’t do any of those things, not to her, even if no one was there to watch. If I let her know me too much, I feared I would be making myself into her burden. And maybe that was why I’d never really tried to be with her, even though I’d always felt that it would be right, the correct thing, even if I wasn’t fulfilling my position as the correct person.

“You’re right,” I said, my voice shaking against my will. “But I don’t have anywhere else.” Stop talking, I wanted to tell myself, but then, I supposed, the problem was always that I didn’t say the right things.

Pippa sighed, long and deep and gentle like the sound of an ocean wave. “You know,” she said, “aside from Hobie, and I suppose my aunt, if you want to count her,” she said _my aunt_ with a degree of distaste and some obligation at the idea of counting her, “you’re really the only person in my life I have from that time. Or before.” Her mouth twitched a little into something that was almost a smile, something almost comforting, or at least, nostalgic. Maybe I was overthinking it, or maybe I just knew because I could recognize myself in her. Her amber-toned brown eyes flickered. I couldn’t think of what to say. 

“That’s not a bad thing, you know. Not everything has to be,” she said, noticing how quiet I was in response to what she had said.

“No,” I said, “I know.” I hadn’t really thought about it from her angle, but I understood what she was saying, that not everything from before had to be a painful reminder of what had happened and what would forever be. And that, maybe, the present and the future didn’t have to be as bad as the past. That was her angle. I wondered what mine was. Sometimes I wasn’t sure anymore.

“Good,” Pippa said. “Sometimes I worry, Theo. About you. About myself, too, I guess. But…” She looked at me for a long moment. The lights were going down and we couldn’t have a conversation, I knew, unless we wanted to have everyone passive aggressively telling us to be quiet.

“I know,” I told her. We weren’t touching, but the old seats in the theater had us close enough to be able to. There was a movie trailer playing in another language, German or Dutch or something similar. I wasn’t looking. Pippa smiled at me with her mouth closed. Then she turned her head, her face illuminated by the screen. I looked at it, then closed my eyes, and it was as if I wasn’t really there, if I didn’t think about it.

I wondered what Pippa was going to say. I wondered if she’d tell me after. But I thought she probably would, because in my case, I decided, I probably wouldn’t be able to, even if I wanted to, even if I knew it was right.

_

It had been years since I’d seen Boris, and in those years I had come to believe we would likely never see each other again, but when he found me, I understood I had been waiting for him. Maybe ever since I had gone to New York all those years ago.

I didn’t think there had been a day I hadn’t thought about him since I left. I didn’t tell him that. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. He was the last person who had ever loved me, and I’d thought it would stay that way for the rest of my life. In a way I had been grateful. Many people don’t get that. My mother hadn’t, to my knowledge. I had loved her, but as her child. No one had loved her in the way Mrs. Barbour had loved her husband or how Hobie had loved Welty or how Boris had loved me. Sometimes that was what had felt the most wrong about it. Not that I thought my mother would reject me if she had lived, but that it would have been selfish of me to openly luxuriate in something no one had ever given her even though she had deserved it so much.

The night I met up with him I dreamed of him. I dreamed we were young again, in Las Vegas, in my father’s house. We didn’t speak much. We just looked out the windows- there were no other houses or other buildings in Desert End anymore, not even the abandoned ones, and we didn’t know where they had gone. It looked like they had never been there in the first place. It was just us; we were the only ones left.

I thought of telling Boris about it the next time we saw each other, but wasn’t sure how to. That didn’t stop me from thinking about it.

But, as I would recall in the following days, once Boris got me started, or once he gave me the excuse to get started, it was difficult getting me to stop.

_

The night of my engagement party I stared in front of the full-length mirror towards the front of the private club Mrs. De Larmessin had suggested to Kitsey and Mrs. Barbour, an invitation-only kind of place that I wouldn’t have been in otherwise. I wondered if anyone expected me to be thankful for that. I was looking into my reflection and working out in my mind what people would see when they looked at me once they started coming- it was early. Vacantly, between thinking about how tired and washed-out I looked, I kept hoping Boris would show up even though deep down I had already accepted it was probably useless to hope for that. While looking at my substantial undereye circles, the tawny skin under my eyes turning gray, I noticed the mirror had some spots on it that looked like fingerprints and I wondered if they were mine.

The club was nearly empty. I didn’t want to enter the main room, in the moment, I didn’t want the party to happen at all, I just wanted to leave, but I knew I couldn’t. If I was going to leave, someone else would probably make the choice for me, anyway; somehow it hadn’t already happened.

It wasn’t Kitsey’s fault, I decided, it wasn’t anyone’s _fault_ in that sense, when I saw Boris and realized first, that it was inevitable he would come and want me to leave, and second, that I would leave with him before he even asked me. Maybe it was a bit too late for me to leave. But I had to do it anyway for reasons I thought even Boris didn’t entirely know and wouldn’t until I told him, for reasons probably only my mother would know in whole without being told.

“Now,” Boris was talking to me in the backseat while Gyuri almost sped along the road, “you would think I may have been to that place before but I have not. I do not think I was missing much. You did not even seem to want to be there.”

Under other circumstances I probably would have said something in protest, just because it would have been the thing to do. But I was very tired and we were about to leave the country and I wasn’t sure what to do anymore other than what came to mind. “You’ve got that right,” I told him, and sighed.

“You are sure you are all right?” he asked, lowering his voice. Just so much that I noticed.

“I’m trying,” I said. It wasn’t entirely the truth but it wasn’t entirely a lie either. It had been like that with us for as long as we’d known each other. If we couldn’t tell the truth we couldn’t tell a whole lie.

Gyuri kept driving. I didn’t care to look back. Boris’ arm was around my shoulder, I noticed, and didn’t realize for how long he’d had it there.

_

It was much later, and nothing really felt truly resolved. I suppose it wouldn’t. When people expect things to feel resolved they usually expect everything to feel like it’s all over. But when things usually feel like they’ve been over for a very long time, resolutions are welcome. Even if they don’t cover anything.

There were times later if I wondered if my mother had only managed to come back and save me because we were both so far away from where it had all happened. But we weren’t so far away from my newer problems, and I supposed if she could come back to me even for a moment, nothing was stopping her. So, I thought, maybe there wasn’t so much stopping me as I had thought there was. Stopping me from what, though, was the question, and a difficult one. I supposed I’d have a long time to work it out, and I didn’t need to do it all at once. That didn’t keep me from thinking about it, even though I had many other subjects on my mind after I left the hotel for Boris’ place in Antwerp and learned it was all over. The painting would be back in the museum, along with many other stolen artworks and artifacts. It had been because of us.

I didn’t say to him, there will always be stolen artifacts, hidden in places even your connections might not be able to get you to. I didn’t tell him some of those stolen things had their places in museums already. I didn’t tell him that some things are stolen by being destroyed, and there is nothing that can bring them back once that has happened. I didn’t say these things then, because I wanted to be happy, and I felt that in a way I was. But I thought them all the same. I was sure he’d listen. I just wanted to wait until it could come easier. It felt like I was keeping so many thoughts for later, and wondered if I was being honest with myself, if I wasn’t really locking them inside me and if they wouldn’t die in there like starved birds abandoned in cages.

We were in a place I knew nothing about. Maybe that was why it felt better. I wasn’t focusing on where we were. Just that we were there and alive.

In Boris’ place time worked differently. We lived in the moment, and the past and future lived in that same moment, and were subject to its rules rather than the things that made the rules of the present. The past few days had been strange, but not bad at all, and even though I kept thinking about what I would do when I returned home, the fact that I knew I had to leave wasn’t making me particularly happy, when I knew Boris wasn’t coming with me, and I had no idea what the two of us were doing. Or, more accurately, I had no idea how we were going to do anything. I wanted him to save his life. I knew I couldn’t do it for him. It was something he’d have to do for himself- it was something everyone has to do for themselves, and we can help each other, but we can’t do it for someone. I wanted to tell Boris that so he could tell me he would do it so that I wouldn’t be begging him for his life later.

It was the middle of the night, but we hadn’t been sleeping for a while. I lay reclining in his bed, the room mostly dark except for one dim lamp’s light, feeling like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.

“Ah. Come on. I saw what you were doing to yourself. You think I do not know what it looks like when someone overdoses? Do you think I have never done it before?” Boris’ hands were both out, supplicating. Someone could paint him that way, I supposed. I couldn’t stand to see him like that. Almost begging me. When I felt like doing the same to him. Stop before you kill yourself. Had anything really changed since we were children? Both of us spent so much energy trying to keep the other alive it distracted us from how we would both be dying if we were on our own, and why that was.

I put my face in my hands. “I don’t want to fight about this. I can’t, Boris.” I knew he wasn’t trying to fight, but it felt almost as stressful as arguing, to have to talk about it like this.

“And I don’t want to see you the way you used to be. What happens if I am not there next time? If you want to be dead so bad, inside, it will happen. One way or another. I have seen it happen so many times. I don’t want to see it happen with you.” If I had more energy I would have asked him, then why the fuck don’t _you_ stop? Do you think it doesn’t make a difference to me if I have to see you die? 

“Boris,” I tried to sound convincing, “there isn’t going to be a next time. I don’t want to be dead. Not anymore.” Because I felt that I had been, for so long.

“Then don’t,” he said, as if it was just as easy as that. He sounded like he was saying, don’t be dead. 

“I’m not,” I said, weary. I wasn’t dead, I was alive, and was supposed to be, that was what my mother was trying to tell me, although I didn’t think I was about to tell Boris about all that, at least not yet. I wanted to, at some point. I supposed it was still possible, ahead of us, and thought that maybe having possibilities ahead of us wasn’t something we should take for granted. It wasn’t something we’d just been handed. Maybe we weren’t even supposed to have that. But we did, and we didn’t have to give it up.

“Hey,” Boris said after a moment, drawing me in closer, and his feet were cold but the rest of him was warm against me, “go back to sleep?” Holding onto me, the two of us safe in the dark together, awake in the time of night when time barely means anything. As if none of this had happened and it was eight years ago. Or as if it had all happened, and that didn’t have to take anything away. I wasn’t sure which one it felt more like. But as to which one it actually was, I was thinking it seemed like the second.

“All right,” I said. I didn’t move away from him. I closed my eyes and nothing around us disappeared and the world stayed the same. And soon we would both have to open our eyes and prepare ourselves for whatever came next, out of everything that was around us and inside of us. But first, for the first time in years, we would truly rest, with each other.


End file.
